the tale of a woman who built herself an illusion to live by *

This summer is going to be my most productive yet. I have quite a few goals, two of which include a whole lot of writing, and reading as well. I'm even taking off two weeks in July and one in September to dedicate solely to writing my thesis a.k.a my collection of short stories. I so far have about a third of it (tentatively) done, even though I am in a perpetual mind frame involving me not thinking any of my stories are worthy of being published.

If any of you are interested I also have a wordpress site that is more literary in theme. I haven't updated it in a long long time. Actually, I think I'll go do that right after this :) I'll post up an excerpt of my most recent writing. Here's the link.

My summer reading list consists of the following:
Desperate Characters, Paula Fox
Miss Lonelyhearts/Day of the Locust, Nathanael West
So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell
Time’s Arrow, Martin Amis
We, Yevgeny Zamyatin
Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
Seize the Day, Saul Bellow
Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Death of Ivan Ilych, Tolstoy

I'm used to reading mostly short stories of late, but I love Gatsby (even though it sounds overrated, it's not), and Gabriel Garcia Marquez is beautiful always. The rest are fairly obscure to me aside from West and Bellow, so we'll see how I do with those.

In other news, I won the American Apparel pleated shorts contest! I'm pretty excited. I get a free pair out of it. :)

And, some good 90s music for this fine summer day.

Cibo Matto - Sugar Water

[* the blog entry title is actually the tagline of the Penguin edition of The Great Gatsby, off to the right (switched, gender-wise). ]